Six months after a fired employee wounded him and fatally shot some of his closest colleagues, John Souter still can’t return to Accent Signage Systems.

He says renovations need to finish in the offices where one of his last memories of the day is a Minneapolis police officer turning a corner, brandishing a handgun.

“I don’t know how long the building is going to take. I can’t go back into that workspace — the way it is,” Souter, a former operations director who expects to return as CEO, said after a Thursday news conference.

Souter, a Wayzata resident, appeared with other gun control advocates at the Ridgedale Hennepin County Library in Minnetonka to ask why his congressman, Rep. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., wasn’t doing more to support universal background checks and other similar measures.

“I’m not the same person, that’s for sure. I don’t laugh the way I used to,” Souter said during the event.

He said the Sept. 27 mass shooting at the Minneapolis-based business left him with broken ribs, a punctured lung and scar tissue.

“Why? Why? This isn’t America,” Souter said, choking back tears.

Even as Souter recovers, Accent Signage’s surviving employees have remarkably pulled together. They were back to work 11 days after the shooting, filling orders for hundreds of sign displays — on time. Even former workers came back to help.

Souter, a former 3M Co. employee, said he learned at the Maplewood-based manufacturer that the key to success is a strong business plan and hiring workers capable of executing the plan without micromanaging. He thinks this strategy served Accent well after the shooting.

Besides the resolve to keep Accent Signage going, last fall’s shooting has motivated survivors such as Souter to join a nationwide movement to increase regulation of gun purchases.

The news conference, which included Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and Chaska Police Chief Scott Knight, was one of about 100 events that the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition held across the nation Thursday to pressure Congress to pass gun control measures.

Shereen Rahamim, the widow of slain Accent Signage owner Reuven Rahamim, was among those in the audience in Minnetonka. “We need to put pressure on them because things need to change,” Rahamim said before the event. She said her teenage son Sami was in Washington, D.C., pushing for change.

Along with Rahamim, the fatal shooting victims included Rami Cooks, described as Rahamim’s right-hand man, employees Ron Edberg and Jacob Beneke, and UPS driver Keith Basinski, who happened to be at the company’s loading dock. Production manager Eric Rivers died Oct. 10 from his wounds. The assailant was Andrew Engeldinger, who had been fired the same day of the shootings.

Paulsen said in a prepared statement: “I continue to meet with law enforcement leaders, mental health professionals, and others to find effective solutions to reduce gun violence, including fixing holes in the existing background check system.”

National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre in a recent speech described universal background checks as a “placebo” that “will never make our schools or streets safer, and will only serve as universal registration of lawful gun owners.”

Rybak acknowledged before the news conference that it could take years for change to happen. But he thinks shooting survivors and victims’ relatives including Souter and the Rahamims are providing powerful arguments against the NRA and the gun industry lobby.

“The very tragic fact of the matter is that there’s a growing lobby of people who have been touched by gun violence. … Nobody should assume that somehow there will always be a safe way for a person in Congress to vote with the NRA,” Rybak said.

Accent Signage Systems

Business: Interior signage maker, with specialty in Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant signs and LED light arrays

One comment

Most of the mass shooters are just MK-Ultra mind-controlled patsies, programmed to detonate by the covert operators. All to create anti-gun hysteria to destroy our civil liberties and get us defenseless before the New World Order.